Fiction

In Merranth, everything is owned. The docks belong to the Patrons, the debts to the Accord, and the law to whoever can afford it.

Tavish Derring keeps a trinket from every job, in memory of the father who taught him the trade and died for a landscape. Somewhere in Thestria is the view that painting shows. Tav means to stand in it.

A freelancer of no country and no file, hired through cutouts by agencies with positions they can’t advertise.

He takes the jobs nobody can afford to own, and he is the best alive at becoming other people. Therein lies the problem: somewhere beneath the aliases, the man himself has gone missing.

Three days into a routine sweep of the north, Thomas Spaulder and his squad find an outpost stripped clean and a note somebody hid rather than sent.

What should be a burn-and-log job becomes a walk into a facility that isn’t supposed to exist, built to turn the Sprawl into a weapon and desperate farmers into its carriers.